Archive for May, 2007

SUPPOSEDLY if you’ve seen over 85 films, you have no life. Mark the ones you’ve seen. There are 239 films on this list. Copy this list, paste this as a note. Then, put x’s next to the films you’ve seen, add them up, change the header adding your number, and click post at the bottom. Have fun.

Icann’s blog. The “Internet Corporation For Assigned Names And Numbers” could be classed as the “government” of the internet: they ultimately assigned all IP address allocations, domain names etc to various providers. Very press releasy, but do have interesting things like the very simple map of the internet (ok, dated September 1969 but 😉 ).

Bob Parsons. The CEO and Founder of GoDaddy, one of the largest domain name registrys out there (IMHO, a bit like McDonalds being the largest chain of restaurants). Very little techy orientated stuff though, seems to be more about him achieving his press releases and publicity.

Domain Tools. DomainTools itself is a very useful site and their blog gives a “well I didn’t know/think about that” way of thinking.

Hosting Providers

Softlayer. The official blog of one of the best US based dedicated server providers (IMHO). Only one entry so far so still too early to judge.

The Planet. Softlayer’s main rival (especially in Texas). Appears to grant a good “insiders view” about the datacenter and the way it’s run.

Kate’s Comment. Kate Craig-Wood (who is married the sister to Nick Craig-Wood of RISC OS fame) is the MD of Memset – my VPS provider. Good overview of things you hadn’t thought about hosting wise (such as environmental impact, power usage issues etc).

Redback Internet. A more techy orientated blog by the providers of web hosting space to my other half.

Dreamhost. A very “strange” blog from a major US shared hosting provider. Covers a wide variety of issues, but the way they do them is very strange to me.

EUKHost. A very technical orientated blog from a UK shared web hosting company.

Do you know any useful blogs like this? I’m sure that many many other companies have them, but let’s see if we can make a good list of them!

Lost your password to your WordPress blog and no longer have access to the email account you set up? Well, there’s a couple of solutions to this – you can either use the Emergency Password Recovery (thanks WeblogToolsCollection) or, if you have got access to the MySQL database, either change the email address contained therein or be really clever and decrypt the stored password.

But the password is encrypted I hear you cry!

Well, there just happens to be a MD5 password lookup site which you could use to decrypt the password!

I always find it useful to have certain software on my computer and my recent change of job (more of this at some point in the near future) has prompted me to check for updates for certain items. So here they are:

EditPlus (version 2.3.1 released 14th of March 2007). This has got to be the one of the best text editors out there – simple to use, has FTP built in, has syntax colouring, has set modes (for PHP, Javascript, HTML and much more) and doesn’t try to take things over. It’s shareware, so if you like it – buy it! I did (several years back) and keep on being tempted to buy another copy just for the sake of it.

Irfanview (version 4 released 23rd of April 2007). A simple to use very handy image viewer (handles practically every format I’ve thrown at it) and simple editor. Completely free of charge.

Google Earth (latest version 4.1 released 6th of May 2007). Ok, not essential – but a very useful tool (and, for some reason, not included in the Google Pack updater so it’s not that easy to keep track of latest versions). It’s nice to fly around the world.

Mozy Remote Backup (version 1.8.2.7, released 9th of May 2007). I think this is an excellent automatic remote backup system for Windows PCs and Macs – it’s just so easy to use and allows you to “roll back” to any backup date. And if you follow this Mozy Backup signup link – you’ll get 2.3Gb (2,304Mb) of storage space FREE of charge to automatically backup your files.

Thunderbird 2 (released 18th of April 2007). A nice little FREE email client to replace the expensive Microsoft Outlook email system (which has a 2Gb email limit) and Outlook Express. It now supports “tags” (like Google Email) and has a good antispam and antiphishing detection system.